Note 59

The Chronology of Shakespeare's Works

The Chandos Portrait of Shakespeare about 1610

The chronology of Shakespeare’s work is fraught with problems; nevertheless stylometry is an invaluable aid to untangling the knots, or freeing the doubts, from when they were most likely written. Below is a timeline developed using Peter Farey’s stylometric analysis of the works. This is not his work; it is my interpretation of the data using his tools. I have tried to use as much stylometric analysis as possible when I came to a work in which Shakespearean scholarship was in doubt. I took care to compare and reasonably come to a conclusion that might credibly be called a consensus amongst mainstream scholars.

In recent years it has become all too obvious that Shakespeare’s career started much earlier than heretofore believed. Scholars such as Eric Sams have labored tirelessly to establish his pre-eminence in time. Their findings suggest that what had been believed to be “bad” quartos were really earlier versions of the now familiar plays in the canon. Like any artist, he revised, and continued to revise throughout his career, his own earlier works. He collaborated with his earlier self, as well as with many of his contemporaries.

I have argued . . . that many of Shakespeare’s plays existed in two significantly different forms in the late sixteenth and in the seventeenth centuries. On the one hand, Shakespeare produced “authorial manuscripts,” instances of what John Webster called the “poem” and what some title pages refer to as the “true original copy.” On the other hand, there were manuscripts that had undergone the company’s preparation for actual performance, what Webster calls “the play,” in other words, the text “as it has been sundry times performed.” Whereas texts in the former group were of a length which the actors found impossible to reconcile with the requirements of performance, the latter had been reduced to what was compatible with the “two hours traffic of our stage.” Contrary to the theatrical scripts, the raison d’etre of the long “poems” I have argued, was basically literary.